Crystalline Thresholds / Les portes de givre

Crystalline Thresholds / Les portes de givre – Sabine Mirlesse’s Portes de Givre was a series of seven frozen passages sculpted by the Atlantic winds during the winter of 2022/23. This ephemeral Land Art installation was inspired by the discovery of her grandfather’s engineering work on the behavior of frost at altitude in the 1930s, and is a nod to the Gallo-Roman temple of Mercury, a place of pilgrimage for centuries atop the Puy de Dôme volcano, uniquely situated above the mists and clouds. Seven portals have been installed according to the constellation of the Pleiades, designed to stimulate the formation of ice and frost due to the micro-climate, which grow and then melt with the arrival of spring. This work is Mirlesse’s first public art installation, and is part of the French Ministry of Culture’s Mondes Nouveaux program.
The origin of the work lies in Sabine’s discovery of a box of photographic negatives during confinement. The artist remembers finding an archive from the 1930s, in black and white, with white forms of frost and snow, and a landscape topography more akin to volcanic terrain. These images were the documentation of scientific research his grandfather had carried out in 1936 at the summit of the Puy de Dôme, as an engineer on a mission to study the effects of frost on aircraft wings for the Ministry of the Air.